Here are the changes in vSphere 6 networking. As you can see there are not very many changes but the impact may be substancial.

Network I/O Control

With vSphere 6 VMware introduces Network I/O Control Version 3 which allows administrators or service providers reserve or guarantee bandwidth to a vNIC in a virtual machine or at a higher level the Distributed Port Group.

This ensures that other virtual machines or tenants in a multi-tenancy environment don’t impact the SLA of other virtual machines or tenants sharing the same upstream links.

Third party (distributed) switches

The Cisco Nexus 1000V has been supported in VMware vSphere hypervisor since 4.0 release (August 2009) up to the current vSphere release 5.5 update 2. We are happy to announce that the Nexus 1000V will continue to be supported in the latest vSphere 6 release which VMware recently announced. Customers who are currently running Nexus 1000V will be able to upgrade to the vSphere 6 release and the new vSphere 6 customers will have the Nexus 1000V as part of their choices for virtual networking.

Cisco is fully committed to support the Nexus 1000V product for our 10,000+ Advanced Edition customers and the thousands more using the Essential Edition software in all future releases of VMware vSphere. Cisco has a significant virtual switching R&D investment with hundreds of engineers dedicated to the Nexus 1000V platform. The Nexus 1000V has been the industry’s leading virtual switching platform with innovations on VXLAN (industry’s first shipping VXLAN platform), and distributed zone firewall (via Virtual Security Gateway released in Jan 2011).

In the last major release of the Nexus 1000V for vSphere, version 3.1 (August 2014) Cisco added significant scaling and security features and we continue to provide subsequent updates (December 2014) with the next release planned for March 2015. The recently released capabilities include:

Tags In

Erik Scholten

The founder and driving force behind VMGuru. With over 20 years experience in IT, he now works as a Cloud Management Specialist at VMware Benelux. He worked as technical consultant, pre-sales and solutions architect for several systems integrators.
He's a long time VMware VCP Data Center Virtualization, VCP Desktop, VCP Cloud Management & Automation, VCA, VSP and VTSP, vExpert Cloud (2017) and 9 year vExpert (2009 - 2017).